How To Make Better Decisions - Annie Duke - #233

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Oh, hello, friends. Welcome back. My guest today is Annie Duke, professional poker player and author. The quality of our life depends upon the quality of our decisions. And as a professional poker player who has competed at the biggest tournaments in the world, Annie understands the value of making good decisions under pressure. So today, expect to learn how to become a great decision maker, why trusting your gut is dangerous, how to account for luck, Annie's framework for making successful and repeatable decisions and much more. It very much highlighted today just how unexamined my own decision making process is. Even as someone who thinks that he's taken the mental model's red pill. And yeah, upon closer examination, the inspection came back and said, I really haven't got a clue what I'm doing. So hopefully today will help you to analyze your own decision making process and come out the other side with a more accurate world view. In other news, this episode of the podcast is brought to you by new sponsor naturesfix.co.uk. I've been using the Jigsaw Health Mag Soothe and Mag SRT magnesium supplement since I spoke to Ben Greenfield. Ben got me onto it, said that it was the best magnesium product he's ever used. I tried it and I have to say the same. If you are not using a proper magnesium product to assist your sleep quality, then this is a real game changer. You might be using a ZMA tablet, like just a sort of generic, cheapy one, or you might not be using anything at all. If you're struggling with your sleep pattern, especially during, as we get towards the winter months, I highly, highly recommend that you check out the Mag Soothe from Jigsaw Health, which is available at naturesfix.co.uk. It really will impact the quality of sleep that you get and it lasts for ages. It's a really nice tasting drink, just one scoop before you go to bed. Tastes like cherry in cold water. It tastes really, really nice. And yeah, it really does impact your sleep. Even my Whoop Strap, the wearable tracker that I have on every night agrees with me. I also have been absolutely nailing the Liposomal Curcumin, which is a very special curcumin liquid blend that helps with inflammation and reducing swelling. So for me, on the recovery back from my old Achilles, that has been a big assistance, along with their Nucleotide Complex, all of the products that I have been trying from Nature's Fix are available at naturesfix.co.uk/modernwisdom. And you can get 10% off everything that you can see on that page with the code modern wisdom. So naturesfix.co.uk/modernwisdom, or there is a link in the show notes below and the code modern wisdom for 10% off everything, including that phenomenal link to Jigsaw Health's Magsooth drink. I really, really highly recommend that you go and check out, especially if you want to step up that sleep game. But for now, it's time to learn how to make better decisions with Annie Duke.
Many of our listeners will be familiar with you, but for those who aren't, can you give us a bit of background? What makes you an authority on decision-making?

**Annie Duke** (3:27)
Oh my God, that sounds so very serious.
Well, I guess it would be kind of the very strange path that I took as an adult. So I started off after college in a PhD program at the University of Pennsylvania. I was studying cognitive psychology, cognitive science. In particular, I was really thinking about how people learn.
So I was going to go off and become a professor, as one would, after getting that degree. And as I was ABD, as we call it, before I defended my thesis, I actually got sick and ended up needing to take about a year off before I went out to become a professor. And in the year that I took off, I started playing poker. And I did that kind of in the meantime, in order to support myself until I could go and start my career. And so the meantime turned into like 18 years, as it does. I kind of kept playing poker. And, you know, and then about eight years into my poker career, I actually started thinking about this very interesting conversation that cognitive science, my background in cognitive science could have with the real world decision making problem that poker presents, which is obviously very high stakes, lots of skin in the game. If you're bad at deciding, you lose all your money over the long run. And so you really have to be kind of thinking about, in particular, how do people learn in these very noisy environments, meaning where there's lots and lots of luck in terms of influencing the outcome and also lots of hidden information, imperfect information, which is, by the way, almost any decision you've ever made in your life, including just like whether to proceed through an intersection, is actually very poker-like in its decision.